This isn’t the weekend where New Yorkers will mistake Carrie Bradshaw for Terry Bradshaw.

One character embraces the blustery city as it is, fabulous warts and all. The other, not so much, for several obvious reasons.

But it’s not as if that’s a huge character flaw on his part.

“I don’t look at it as a positive,” Fox Sports NFL studio analyst Terry Bradshaw said recently about why the league decided to drop the 48th edition of the Super Bowl in the great northeast metropolitan area that sits in freezing temperatures this time of year.

“I don’t quite understand why we’re in New York. Great city. Was there some deal worked out?”

The deal is: Fox employees like Bradshaw who spend most of the fall weekends flying into Los Angeles to do their work don’t particularly feel a need to deal with this inconvenient truth that a pregame show outdoors in less-than-ideal conditions is best for their health during this cold-and-flu season.

Believe me, if you’ve had a taste of this latest flu strain, you’d take every precaution to avoid it.

The other deal is: It’s going to make for great TV either way. And TV is where the NFL’s frozen bread is buttered.

That’s the positive angle for Fox, which is covering the whole shebang from MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., but will have the first part of its pregame show in New York.

Everyone’s going to be talking about the weather, but no one’s going to try to do anything about it. Especially if it’s nasty. That just makes it more sexy for the city.

“If there is (bad) weather, there will be potentially more initial tune in,” deducted Fox Sports exec Eric Shanks. “I couldn’t say how much or what, but this is probably the biggest Super Bowl in the modern era to have this much discussion about something in addition to the game and the players. It’s going to have to manifest itself into more people tuning in.”

Except if influential TV guys like Bradshaw aren’t on board, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of crowning a champion in a cold-weather, miserable-condition situation?

“Yeah. I wouldn’t want to play in that weather,” repeated Bradshaw, who won the last of his four Super Bowls with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1980 against the Los Angeles Rams at the balmy Pasadena Rose Bowl – and was even named game MVP despite throwing three interceptions.

“It should be more of a reward not so much for the city or the NFL but for the players.”

Bradshaw, working the 10th NFL championship game of his broadcast career, even took his complaints to WFAN, the all-sports anchor of New York, when he echoed this week: “Thank you commissioner, thank you Super Bowl committee for putting us in New York. And we all know why we’re in New York, it’s because they were paid for that stupid stadium in New Jersey … By the way, not a gorgeous stadium either.”

True enough. But please, continue.

“It’s freakin’ outside in New York, are you kidding me? Not even New York — New Jersey. It’s not like Minnesota, it’s a dome. It’s not like it’s Detroit, it’s a dome. It’s not like it’s Indy, it’s a dome.”

Then again, when someone like Bradshaw starts making sense …

“I don’t want it to be bad, ‘cause I’m there. I want it to be nice, but I don’t think you should be putting Super Bowls in northern cities in the winter time.”

Maybe in his next career, Bradshaw will get into TV programming side. For now, he’s just one of the meat puppets who happens to have an opinion counter what his employers would want to hear, with enough gumption to say it without fear of expulsion.

Monte Burke, a staff writer at Forbes (the magazine whose proud motto remains “The Capitalistic Tool”), pointed out in a column this week that “the weather means very little to the folks who matter to the $9 billion-plus league (revenues) — the advertisers, who are paying a reported $4 million for a 30-second ad during this year’s game. The reason these brands will fork over that amount of dough is that folks at home will tune into the game even if the wind chill is -3 degrees. And they will watch those ads.”

To help the millions of viewers embrace the weather as a teaching moment, Fox will add a few more graphic devices to its broadcast. One of them, the “Fox Weather Trax,” will attempt to illustrate the airflow patterns that take place inside the stadium that could affect kickers and quarterbacks. Shanks said it’s coming from the same folks who did wind forecasting and graphic displays for the America’s Cup sailing event recently in San Francisco.

So it’ll be incumbent upon everyone — including the human officials on the field who won’t get the chance to head to the sideline to warm their hands between possession exchanges — to not just look at how the little flags are blowing atop the field goal posts to determine how the game could change on a little wind gust at just the right moment.

“Wind is obviously an invisible factor that can directly affect the outcome of a game,” said Zac Fields, Fox Sports’ VP of graphics and technology. “Since the wind has a notorious reputation in the New Jersey Meadowlands, and given the magnitude of the game, we looked for and found a great tool to depict this phenomenon in excellent detail.”

Ultimately, the weather that could impact the game most isn’t what’s related to the New York-New Jersey area, but the rest of the country. If they’re indoors because the weather outside their windows isn’t delightful, all the better for the game. As it turns out, rain may be finally on its way for Southern California on Sunday. That can only help.

Joe Buck, calling his fourth Super Bowl for Fox, admitted on the Dan Patrick radio show this week that he’s openly rooting for snow.

“We’ve all wasted so much time (talking about the) weather,” he said. “A little snow, a little wind whipping around will be a good thing.”

Bradshaw, who has been asked to put himself out there and present the Lombardi Trophy to the winning team at game’s end Sunday, is quoted at SportsIllustrated.com this week that he doesn’t “like any restrictions or excuses. I am happy for my network, because it will bring so much exposure to Fox. And is there a greater city than New York City? From that standpoint, I am thrilled.”

Yet, if only . . .

“We are team people here,” he finished, “but I would rather we had the game where it was warm and we could sneak off and play golf.”

Sure, but try getting a foursome at Rancho Park Golf Course across from the Fox lot on Pico Boulevard, on a Sunday morning. Even if it’s freezing rain.

thomas.hoffarth@langnews.com@tomhoffarth on Twitter

RECORD, PAUSE, DELETE

Gauging the media’s high- and low-level marks of the week, and what’s ahead:

THE LEFTOVERS

It’s too bad respected journalist and author Jeff Pearlman felt the need to backtrack over what he called an impulsive blog post (at jeffpearlman.com) in the aftermath of how he singled out Fox Sports reporter Erin Andrews for the way she handled the interview/rant of Seattle Seahawks defensive back Richard Sherman at the end of the NFC championship game. Pearlman’s guilt pangs over referring to Andrews as “the Kardashian of televised sports” apparently got the best of him, and while it may have triggered some volatile reader response, the intent of his original post shouldn’t be lost: Attractive women gain an inside track on TV sideline jobs and some are not fully capable of handling all that is required during a live, volatile broadcast. Pearlman admits that those who accused him of being sexist “tore” the most at his insides. Thus, he clarified his message and apologized to Andrews. She is, by all measures of those who work with her, a very nice person, hard working and well intentioned. But this was a moment where it appeared she was out of her area of expertise, so when things unraveled, she was told by the producer in her earpiece to cut off the interview (as was the case here). In the end, compare her Sherman interview to the one ESPN’s Ed Werner did moments later. And read into this what you may, but Fox has assigned Pam Oliver to handle the Seattle sidelines for Sunday’s Super Bowl, with Andrews on the Broncos’ side.

THE APPETISERS

What’s planned to be included sometime in Fox’s four-hour Super Bowl pregame show (running from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Channel 11): A Joe Buck-narrated tribute to the late Fox play-by-play man Pat Summerall; a feature on Brooklyn-born Vince Lombardi and his ties to playing at Fordham University (which will include an interview with Fordham grad Vin Scully); President Obama submitting to a live interview with Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly from the White House; a Bradshaw taped walk-and-talk discussion with former New York Super Bowl hero Joe Namath, and revisiting that awkward red-carpet entrance of celebs as they are interviewed by Michael Strahan and Charissa Thompson. ESPN’s pregame (7 to 11 a.m.) includes a Tom Jackson conversation with former Broncos teammate and current team VP of football operations John Elway and a piece on how Seahawks coach Pete Carroll has maintained his relationship with cancer victim Jake Olson going back to their days at USC. The NFL Network’s “NFL GameDay” goes from 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. hosted by Rich Eisen with Kurt Warner and Marshall Faulk.

WHAT’S TO GO

Fox will allow those with a computer or tablet (but not a phone) to watch the live video stream of the Super Bowl through the Fox Sports Go app or via FoxSports.com and NFL.com, which actually has both an English and Spanish (Fox Deportes) broadcast available for the first time. However, the NFL will block streaming of the game for those inside the stadium because it says the current technology cannot handle the wifi overload due to bandwidth issues.

Tom Hoffarth has been with the Daily News/Southern California News Group since 1992 as a general assignment sports reporter, columnist and specialist in the sports media. He has been honored by the Associated Press for sports columnists and honored by the Southern California Sports Broadcasters Association for his career work. His favorite sportscaster of all time: Vin Scully, for professional and personal reasons. He considers watching Zenyatta win the Breeders' Cup 2009 Classic to be the most memorable sporting event he has covered in his career. Go figure that.

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